Pope's hints on married priests trouble Vatican

VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis's hints about a possible opening on the issue of married priests are sowing confusion in the Vatican and among Catholic reformists and conservatives alike.

Twice in three months, Francis has talked about changes to the tradition of celibate priests -- although he has never been precise about how exactly this could be reformed.

On a flight back from his trip to the Middle East, Francis pointed out that there were already married priests in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic and Coptic Catholic churches.

"The door is always open but we are not talking about it now as the order of the day," the Argentine pontiff said.

It is a priority, however, for the dozens of campaign groups that have sprung up -- many formed by men who have been forced to leave the priesthood to get married.

The European Federation of Married Catholic Priests estimated more than 100,000 former Catholic priests have got married over the years -- a figure which would make up around a quarter of the number of current priests.

Earlier this year, 26 women who said they were in love with priests living in Italy, wrote an open letter to the pope asking for a Vatican audience and speaking of their "suffering" because of the secret lives they have to lead.

Vatican expert Andrea Tornielli said at the time that Francis was particularly sensitive to the issue as, when he was the archbishop of Buenos Aires, he was close to an Argentine bishop who renounced the priesthood for love.

The pope's comments over the weekend have had the effect of a new bombshell after La Repubblica daily in an interview quoted him as saying on priestly celibacy: "There are solutions and I will find them."

The comments were immediately denied by Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi who said that the interviewer -- the newspaper's 90-year-old founder, Eugenio Scalfari -- had not written down the exact quotations.